The Zeit-Geist eBook

Within certain self-pleasing limits Ann had always
been a good-natured and generous person, and she experienced
a strong impulse of this good nature and generosity
just now, but it was only for a moment, and she stifled
it as a thing that was quite absurd. Her father
must be relieved, of course, from his horrid situation;
and, after all, Bart could help him quite easily,
more easily than any other man in the world could,
and then come back and go on with his life as before.
Questions of conscience had never, so far, clouded
Ann’s mental horizon. A moment’s
effort to regain her habitual standpoint made it quite
clear to her that in this case it was she, she and
Christa, who were making the sacrifice; a minute more,
and she could almost have found it in her heart to
grumble at the condition of the vow which she had so
liberally sketched the night before, and only the
fact that there was something about Bart which she
did not at all understand, and a fear that that something
might be a propensity to withdraw from his engagement,
made her submissively adhere to it.

“Christa and I will sign the pledge. We
will give up dancing and wearing finery. We will
stop being friends with worldly people, and we will
go to church and meetings, and try to like them.”
Ann repeated her vow.

Bart took the pen and ink with which she chronicled
her sales of beer and wrote the vow twice on two pages
of his note-book; at the bottom he added, “God
helping me.” Ann signed them both, he keeping
one and giving her the other.

This contract on Ann’s part had many of the
elements of faith in it—­a wonderful audacity
of faith in her own power to revolutionise her life
and control her sister’s, and all the unreasoning
child-likeness of faith which could launch itself
boldly into an unknown future without any knowledge
of what life would be like there.

On the part of Toyner the contract showed the power
that certain habits of thought, although exercised
only for a few months, had over him. Good people
are fond of talk about the weakness of good habits
compared with the strength of bad ones. But,
given the same time to the formation of each, the
habits which a man counts good must be stronger than
those which he counts evil, because the inner belief
of his mind is in unity with them. Toyner believed
to-night that he was in open revolt against a rule
of life which he had found himself unable to adhere
to, and against the God who had ordained it; but,
all the same, it was this rule, and faith in the God
which he had approached by means of it, that actuated
him during this conference with Ann. As a man
who had given up hope for himself might desire salvation
for his child, so he gravely and gently set her feet
in what he was accustomed to regard as the path of
life before he himself left it.